Re: [orca-list] Accessibility of apps

[Krishnakant <krmane openmailbox org>]

+1 Kendell,
Just to add,
1, there are government decisions which have impacted Accessibility and 
acceptance of free software.
The southern state of Kerala in India where I stay is one such example 
where free software is mandatory in all schools and most organizations 
use it.
As a result the need is felt and there are hackers like Nalin who are on 
this list who actively work for Linux accessibility.
2, Organizations like NFB will only promote some thing which is really 
production ready in their view and for that accessibility development 
must step up.
But for accessibility to take serious consideration, such organizations 
must promote what ever is already accessible.
So this is a vicious circle.
Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.


On Monday 22 February 2016 11:08 AM, kendell clark wrote:
> hi
> Just my personal opinion, but the linux blind community as a whole needs
> to step up and be proud of the software they use. Too many times on hear
> I'll see new users join who have used other platforms, and when they run
> into a problem the answer they too often get is, shrug, not my problem,
> go file a bug. That's all well and good for seasoned open source users,
> but to a new user you might as well say go learn Greek. It's why I've
> taken on, or tried to, the task of filing the accessibility bugs against
> gnome, mate, cinnamon, and ... I think those are it. What I've observed
> is that the gnome people know there are accessibility bugs, but still
> fall back on the "sorry, we don't know how to fix it" response so many
> others do. There are exceptions of course, like joanmeri, mathias
> claison, but for the most part that's what I've gotten. Bugs do get
> fixed of course, but it needs the blind community to step up and
> complain loudly that these bugs get fixed. Otherwise the bugs may linger
> because the gnome people are going to think that not enough people are
> impacted by a bug to bother fixing it. In the mate and cinnamon
> communities, they do care about accessibility, but they don't know how
> the accessibility stack works. I've found some documentation on this,
> but it seems geared towards people who already know gtk, c++, and the
> like. No beginner documentation at all. This needs to change. And it
> can, if we all work together. I don't think it will take lidigation to
> drumb up support, it just takes the people who use linux to be as
> passionate about their software as a windows or mac user would. The
> government situation doesn't help. I don't know how much influence
> organizations like the nfb, afb, etc have, but if they pushed linux as a
> viable option, as they should, that would automatically get interest
> from people who would otherwise disregard it. I'm not sure what can be
> done about that, I'm no political person and I'm not the best one to be
> diplomatic, lol.
> Just my two scents
> Kendell Clark
>
>
> Krishnakant wrote:
> > Audacity is a great choice.
> > Lot of Blind people may be interested in professional sound editing,
> > and Audacity is very popular just like VLC and Firefox is popular.
> > Secondly I can hardly understage the importance of accessibility of
> > PDF, Libre office Calc and Impress.
> > Most importantly, some bugs in the gnome shell itself needs urgent
> > attention.
> > Like I had reported some time back, the Wifi strength is not reported,
> > Many notifications such as mobile broadband and Wifi activation is not
> > announced.
> > This brings us to the debate of who's responsibility it is.
> > We can observe that the Orca devs have always done a great job, mostly
> > taking it on themselves and hacking around an existing problem.
> > But that is not a very practical way always.
> > For example we may work around a bug in Libre Office Calc because the
> > developers of Calc did not give enough time on a bug report.
> > But then some day they do pay attention and fix the bug.
> > Needless to say that the hack done before by Orca devs obviously has a
> > possibility of breaking.
> > Being a programmer myself, I know how it feels when you take hard work
> > to retro fit a software to work with another component and then that
> > another component fixes some bugs and our work breaks.
> > So a coordinated strategy is needed.
> > Happy hacking.
> > Krishnakant.
> >
> > On Monday 22 February 2016 02:19 AM, B. Henry wrote:
> > > BTW, I like the idea of fixing audacity, and linphone.
> > > I mostly use the cli interface to linphone, but have had to write
> > > scripts to improve it/no accessability issues there though. The GTK
> > > linphone interface
> > > is so close/would love to see it get where it should be.
> > > Rhythmbox some times seems hard to move around in, but I can't put
> > > exact issues in to words off the top of my head as I don't use it
> > > much because of the
> > > issues I can't pstate very clearly at the moment.
> > > Gpodder: a fine program, under steady development/lead dev sounds
> > > like a nice guy. I wonder if there could be an easy fix to the
> > > constant reporting of
> > > download progress that makes using the program once d-loads have
> > > started a pain, a few other things could be done to improve its
> > > usability with Orca as
> > > well, but would need to spend some time with a sighted person wtching
> > > the screen to know how much can and can't be accessed with a mouse at
> > > certain
> > > times as the interface is reported differently depending on whether
> > > or not updates have been just done or if one has downloaded or
> > > otherwise interacted
> > > since last update check.
> > >      
> > _______________________________________________
> > orca-list mailing list
> > orca-list gnome org
> > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> > Orca wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca
> > Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/
> > GNOME Universal Access guide:
> > https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html
> > Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org